4.12.2010

Homemade Pizza in 30 Minutes!

Believe it or not, homemade pizza is one of Bryan's and my favorite last-minute dinners. The minute we find ourselves stuck in the "what do you want to eat?" conundrum, we grab a bag of Trader Joe's pizza dough from the fridge and a great dinner is only 30 minutes away. We use anything that's in our refrigerator, freezer or pantry; basil, mushrooms, Parmesan, frozen meatballs, bacon, etc. Don't have pizza sauce? Use canned pasta sauce. Heck, you can even use canned tomatoes if you want. Just toss in a little oregano, basil and good ole' S&P.

Making your own pizza is ridiculously easy

The other night we made a truly down-and-dirty pizza. In our house, that simply means the refrigerator was nearly bare so we had to scavenge our freezer and pantry for ingredients. It's a fun challenge; making pizza out of whatever you can find. Here's what we came up with: TJ's whole wheat pizza dough, pizza sauce, frozen turkey meatballs, basil, mushroom, onion and half a block of grated Parmesan cheese. Sounded like the makings of a great pizza to us!

Trader Joe's whole wheat pizza dough

Our last-minute pizza dinner, before baking

I microwaved the frozen meatballs and cut them into quarters, chopped the fresh ingredients and opened the jar of pizza sauce (also from Trader Joe's). I put our Mario Batali pizza pan in the oven, set the oven to 450 degrees, rolled out the pizza dough on a floured surface and waited for the oven the come to temperature. Once I heard the quintessential oven "beep!," it was go time. Or more like (almost) dinner time. I took out the pizza pan (careful, it's HOT!), delicately laid the dough over it and worked fast to arrange the rest of the ingredients. Then back in the oven it went for 12-15 minutes. We like our dough extra crispy, so 15 minutes seems to do the trick.

Throw all the ingredients on the pizza dough. It doesn't have to be pretty; you're at home!

If you haven't tried to make your own pizza, I promise when you do it will be incredibly hard to order for delivery again. From start to finish, our pizzas are ready in 30 minutes. Fifteen minutes prep and like I said, another 12-15 baking. Why wait 30 minutes for delivery again when you can have this? Bon appetit!

5 comments:

I think I saw a pizza recipe that involved using baked beans as part of the topping :p I haven't tried it yet, but I guess it would add a different taste to the pizza, it's cheap and a different way to use baked beans!!

Thanks for sharing this recipe it's definitely a really good reward for my brother who got his Food Safety Training last week. But still work on the dough first. I'm not really the cook-type but I'd like to do something special for him.